McKinney: DoD shot 5,000 prisoners during Katrina

Ed MorrisseyPosted at 12:15 pm on October 1, 2008

It wouldn’t be an election cycle without Cynthia McKinney’s lunacy, and fortunately she hasn’t shied away from providing it. Here, we watch as the Green Party’s endorsed presidential candidate accuses National Guard soldiers of committing 5,000 murders of prisoners in the wake of Hurricane Katrina:

If you think that this is the kind of insanity one normally hears from Alex Jones, well … you’d be right. The conspiracy theorists on the Left and the Right tend to embrace each other at a certain point, just south of rationality. For these people, little points like evidence and common sense provide no obstacles at all to paranoia and fantasy.

For instance, let’s skip past the extremely weak sourcing McKinney uses to make her charges and go right to some obvious points. Wouldn’t the families of these 5,000 prisoners wonder what happened to them? And which prisoners, specifically, have not been accounted for? At least a few names of people who were in Louisiana state custody before Katrina and then not in custody afterwards would provide a starting point for any investigation. And it’s possible to lose a few bodies in the Louisiana swamps, but not even that legendary territory could hide 5,000 of them at once without a few of the locals taking notice.

Normally, we’d dismiss this kind of idiocy, but this is no ordinary idiot. McKinney is a former member of Congress and a candidate for President on a party that wants to claim national legitimacy. This shows the intellectual level of the Greens, but it also puts in play yet another baseless conspiracy theory about Katrina and its aftermath. We’ll be hearing this lie for the next few years, thanks to McKinney.